Poetic Nonsense: Robert Graves,

The White Goddess and Children’s Poetry

Michael Joseph

Nonsense and nursery rhymes are among the most undervalued

aspects of the oeuvre of Robert Graves, and yet, if examined with
the seriousness that informed their creation, they reveal a range of
meanings and beliefs that can complicate and inform our
understanding of Graves’s poetics. With notable exceptions,
scholars have preferred to hive off Graves’s nonsense and nursery
rhymes, and to regard them as something akin to self-indulgence
(in the order of a weakness for puns). But there is abundant
evidence in Graves’s letters, criticism and in the poems
themselves, that his notions of nonsense and nursery rhyme
embraced complexity, depth and originality, and that they sprung
from the same deep pools of thought and feeling that nourish all of
Graves’s poetry.
There is also evidence to suggest that in his early twenties,
Graves gave serious thought to becoming a children’s author. In a
letter to Siegfried Sassoon in July 1918 he writes, ‘if I ever make
any name for myself for poetry & stories, it’s the children’s stunt
that I’m going to succeed in, I’m sure’.1 Although his certainty
waned after the publication of Fairies and Fusiliers,2 and he tells
Marsh ‘I have finished with the Fusilier kind of poem: and am not
going to specialise in children’s poetry either but write just exactly
what comes nearest my fancy’, children’s rhymes continued to
captivate him; in 1919, after preparing the manuscript of Country
Sentiment, he tells Marsh: ‘hope you like the new one at the end of
the Country Sentiment book. And the nursery rhymes some of
which, who knows? may survive the longest of any’.3 It is not
unreasonable to suppose that over the period of three years or
more, Graves believed he had a particular gift and temperament
for writing children’s poetry and wondered if perhaps he was
destined to be a children’s poet.
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By the time Country Sentiment appeared, Graves had published

five books, four containing poems that could, and eventually
would, be issued for children. Some number of these had been
intended for a book of poems that he had been planning for three
years, whose working title, The Penny Fiddle, would become the
title of his 1960 publication.4
He had begun collaborating on the book in 1916 with Nancy
Nicholson soon after they met. The 1918 letter to Sassoon quoted
above contains early drafts of two of those poems, along with
another children’s poem that would remain unpublished during
Graves’s lifetime. It also contains a fifth children’s poem
integrated into the drawing of a plate, a crude copy of Nancy’s
design, which Graves tells Sassoon belongs to a set of plate
designs they have already sold to ‘Goode’s, the big china firm’
(figure 1).5

Fig. 1
Drawing and poem in a letter from Graves to Sassoon, July 1918
(The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, The New York
Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations)
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About the same time he met Nancy, scarcely three months after
being badly wounded at the Battle of the Somme, Graves had
praised the children’s poetry of fellow Georgian Walter de la Mare
in a letter to Marsh: ‘When next I come to London I do so want to
meet de la Mare. I have been reading Peacock Pie again and it
improves every time’.6 De la Mare, a poet, father, and spinner of
ghost stories in old-fashioned rustic diction, must have seemed the
personification of domestic felicity, or as near to it as a writer
could get, and perhaps as Graves envisioned life after the war,
writing children’s poems took on the aspect of a poet’s privilege.
Meeting Nancy undoubtedly spurred Graves to think about
children’s poems, and thinking about children’s poems
undoubtedly encouraged him to think about Nancy.
In the 1929 edition of Good-bye to All That, Graves states that
the source of their initial attraction was ‘child-sentiment’: ‘my
child-sentiment and hers [. . .] answered each other’.7
Collaborating on an illustrated book of children’s poems became
the reason for continuing their relationship, for, as Richard
Perceval Graves notes, Graves had otherwise taken little notice of
Nancy.8 Graves writes simply, ‘I began a correspondence with
Nancy about some children’s rhymes of mine which she was
going to illustrate’ (p. 320).9
Graves also records that during the war he had developed other
strong poetic connections to children and poetry:

[Siegfried and I] defined the war in our poems by making

contrasted definitions of peace. For Siegfried it was hunting and
nature and music and pastoral scenes; with me it was chiefly
children. When I was in France I used to spend much of my spare
time playing with the French children of the villages in which I
was billeted. I put them into my poems[. . . ]. (p. 277)

These poems he published in Fairies and Fusiliers.

Frank L. Kersnowski suggests that reflections on children were
‘brought into’ other poems, such as ‘Give Us Rain’, which Graves
published in Country Sentiment (along with some of the poems
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that he had intended for The Penny Fiddle).10 The concluding lines
of ‘Give us Rain’ focus on children as the victims of war: ‘But the
Flags fly and the Drums beat, denying rest, / And the children
starve, they shiver in rags’.11 Kersnowski admits the images do
not move us, however inclined we are to feel pity for the poem’s
subjects, and he commends Graves for showing ‘good sense and
taste in not reprinting it’ (p. 89).
A more ingenious poem in the same collection might also have
sprung from observing children in France. ‘Country at War’
reflects on what the English children are doing back home safe
from the horror of battle:

Children play at shop,

Warm days, on the flat boulder-top,
With wildflower coinage, and the wares
Are bits of glass and unripe pears.

Kersnowski describes the setting as definitively English (p. 90),

and yet could it not have been coined upon the play of French
children? The analogy between children playing at shopkeepers
and entreating God to witness their innocence when their play gets
out of hand – which may remind us that Graves understood the
war as a conflict between trade rivals (Good-bye to All That, p.
288) – and frenzied soldiers who murder seemingly against their
will is nicely complicated if we want to see the French children
behind the pretty English façade. The psychological tension
between the biological need to protect children in harm’s way and
the hostility aimed at individuals whose unfledged irresponsibility
brought endless misery is more acute when they are, figuratively,
the same persons, and the soldiers who have been enlisted to
protect them are also the instrument of their ruin and death.
Announcing that a book improved with each reading, as Graves
had done with Peacock Pie, may be a way of delicately
insinuating that it was not so hot to begin with. But even if Graves
had not been thinking that life in a village penning nursery rhymes
was not worth living, he may have come to think it later. His
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explanation in Good-bye to All That for avoiding psychiatry and

thus banishing his ‘Pier-Glass haunting’ and suffering the fate of
becoming ‘a dull easy writer’ (p. 369), suggests as much, even
though ‘The Hills of May’, and ‘The Magical Picture’, poems of
this period, neither dull nor easy, do find their way into The Penny
Fiddle (1960).
The fear of writing predictably, a reflection perhaps of an
emerging poetic tendency toward what Graves called ‘emotional
thought’, forms the subject of a 1923 poem, ‘Interlude: On
Preserving a Poetical Formula’, which touches on Graves’s
attitude toward his nursery rhymes in an ostensibly dismissive
way.12 First published in Whipperginny, ‘Interlude’ consists of
two parts; in the first, Graves appears to be telling readers that
whether his work tackles difficult and even horrible topics, or
returns ‘childishly’ to ‘Mother-skirts of love and peace / To play
with toys until those horrors leave me’, he is writing authentically,
he is himself: ‘The SPIRIT’S the same, the Pen-and-Ink’s the
same’. If he had abandoned writing for the general public in 1921,
as he claimed in Good-bye to All That, then, perhaps the poem
represents something of a rearguard action, or perhaps the
audience for the poem is Graves, himself, the reader over his
shoulder, whom he would call ‘old enemy’ in that poem (Graves,
‘The Reader Over My Shoulder’).
In the second, parable-like part of ‘Interlude’, subtitled ‘Epitaph
on an Unfortunate Artist’, he invites the reader to read (him) with
a critical eye, and ear:

He found a formula for drawing comic rabbits:

This formula for drawing comic rabbits paid.
Till in the end he could not change the tragic habits
This formula for drawing comic rabbits made.

Recycling the awkward phrase ‘drawing comic rabbits’ and

knocking down obvious end rhymes, this epitaph demonstrates,
backwards, the kind of musical sensitivity that ought to be a
prophylactic against dull, formulaic writing, and in that regard it
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becomes a parody of a parody, most sensitive where it seems least,

and a gentle poke at the audience it postulates in the poem’s
beginning (readers, critics, even, who knows, his older, nimbler,
self) for whom royalties seem the sole criterion by which to judge
a book of poems. In view of the rough treatment of ‘toys’ in
‘Interlude’, one gets the impression that the principal cause of
Graves’s concern about writing formulaic poems is his nursery
rhymes (psychologically necessary to distract oneself from the
terror of history though they may be). And yet, the compactness
and deceptive simplicity of the poem – modelling a kind of agility
and ironic depth while feigning clumsiness, being in fact the very
opposite of what one seems to be – are the hallmarks of his finest
nonsense. Is Graves cleverly apologising for being too clever, or
cleverly not apologising? One might suggest that the apologetic or
concessionary tone implied by the title is a ruse, and that Graves
was attempting to demonstrate that what seems formulaic, or
perhaps mere child’s play, is more complex and marvellous than
readers realise – or, unless they read very carefully, will realise. In
any case, he would continue writing children’s poems and
nonsense into his seventies.
I would argue that nursery rhymes appealed to Graves as a child
and then a young poet for reasons more fundamental than profit or
escape or degree of difficulty, that they epitomised, perhaps more
than they expressed, a structure of consciousness by which he was
spellbound. He implies this possibility very roughly in his earliest
published poems: in ‘The Poet in the Nursery’, the initial poem of
Over the Brazier (1916), and in ‘Babylon’, published less than a
year later in Goliath and David, which begins with the declaration,
‘The child alone a poet is’.
While ‘Babylon’ is philosophically compatible with Rousseauian
notions about the transcendental child and society’s corrupting
influence, even to the point of echoing Wordsworth’s nostalgic
evocation of chapbook heroes from The Prelude, it also expresses
a Keatsian discomfort:

Rhyme and music follow in plenty

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For the lad of one-and-twenty,

But Spring for him is no more now
Than daisies to a munching cow;
Just a cheery pleasant season,
Daisy buds to live at ease on.

Despite excluding ‘Babylon’ from his canon, practically from its

inception, starting with Poems (1914–26), Graves deemed the
underlying question serious enough to acknowledge it three
decades later in a ‘stunt’ for which posterity does, in fact,
remember him – ‘The White Goddess’:

Green sap of Spring in the young wood a-stir

Will celebrate the Mountain Mother,
And every song-bird shout awhile for her […].13

Locating this comment, that children are in fact genuine, if

unskilled, poets, in the credo of his most encompassing and
ultimately most influential work on poetry, Graves leaves no
doubt about its relevance to his deepest intuitions about poetry,
and perhaps reveals an underthought to ‘Interlude’ that reinforces
the idea of the poem as an integration or dialogue of selves. The
alternative discourses of ‘Interlude’ are cognate: wrestling ‘with
fiendish darkness blinking threatfully’ and darting ‘childishly
[. . .] to Mother-skirts’ are but two modes of invoking the White
Goddess.
The relevance of the White Goddess to nonsense and nursery
rhyme is explicit and significant. In Robert Graves: His Life and
Work, Martin Seymour-Smith conceptualises the Goddess as a
‘factor in the structure of the poetic personality’.14 Although I
think the phrase ‘poetic personality’ invites misinterpretation,
implying that all poets share the same personality or personality
type, or that poetry is determined by psychology – that poets write
poetry because they have the personality of poets – I am inclined
to admire Seymour-Smith’s approach. However, I would suggest
that to avoid this tautology we emend ‘poetic personality’ to a
more general ‘structure of consciousness’, and add that this factor
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is also found in its concomitant within human history. Receptivity

to, and the capacity to value, this factor qualify somebody as a
poet, with prowess as a writer being a secondary attribute. When
Graves writes, in the introduction to Poems 1938–1945, ‘I write
poems for poets […]. To write poems for other than poets is
wasteful’, he appears to be saying that one writes poems for
anyone who can find the truth in poetry, or accept that the
‘aboutness’ of poetry, its intentionality, is truth (in the Greek
sense of aretê, or excellence, in the sense of ‘true spiritual feeling
of my nonsense’).15 Not that Robert Graves is writing just for a
particular writing school. So, changing ‘personality’ to
‘consciousness’ privileges Graves’s own phenomenology and
avoids ontological statements such as that the White Goddess does
not really exist.
In a sense, the struggle for the soul of Graves’s poetry will turn
on the question of whether we ultimately see the White Goddess
as merely an imaginatively-shaped reflection of Graves’s own
random life experiences, or as a symbol of a quest for being – for
aretê – mediated by the elements of experience: whether we
ascribe explanatory power to psychology or to ontology.
The Goddess is, according to Graves, always manifested as a
phenomenon external to oneself, as a transpersonal agency and the
intentional object of poetic vision. Need we continue to write that
Graves’s apprehensions are grounded in subjectivity, in personal
history, beliefs, psychology, conditioning, receptivity, personality,
predisposition and so forth – as though yours and mine were not?
Locating the White Goddess within human consciousness rather
than a particular personality allows that poetic apprehensions are
apprehensions of the human condition and recognises that we have
the capacity to criticise Graves in a nontrivial, non-formulaic way
that is not restricted to de-legitimising his research or uttering the
most hackneyed of phrases, such that in The White Goddess,
Robert Graves was creating metaphors for his poetry. Graves’s
apprehensions are not relativised to a particular lucky or troubled
personality, but available at every moment to all of us: ‘And every
song-bird shout awhile for her’ asserts a belief in the universality
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of poetic inspiration in the most transpersonal sense because it

attests to a belief in the presence of the White Goddess even in the
intentionality of nursery rhyme and nonsense.
In his ‘green sap’ phase, however, Graves occasionally seems
uncomfortable with the childishness of his poetic genius, no more
so than when he is professing he is not. In 1922, in On English
Poetry, he writes, ‘childish habits in a grown man [. . .] are
considered ridiculous’.16 He describes childishness with great
theatrical flair, as ‘amazed wondering, sudden terrors, laughter to
signify mere joy, frequent tears and similar manifestations of
uncontrolled emotion’. Perhaps the equivalence he draws between
poetry and childishness suggests a modicum of ambivalence about
being a poet, an ambivalence that we see, however couched in
artful affirmation, in ‘Interlude’.
In language somewhat similar to Graves’s, Mark Oppenheimer
expresses discomfort with poetry in a recent New York Times
article about the poetry critic, Stephen Burt:

Being a major poetry critic in the United States today may seem
like a dubious honor, almost akin to being the best American
cricketer, or a distinguished expert on polka. Yet we still teach
poetry to our children, and we still reach for it at important
moments – funerals, weddings, presidential inaugurations. We
tend to look askance at those who claim to be practitioners,
skeptical that their work could be any good.17

Oppenheimer does not intend to mock poetry or poets, and he

means to praise Burt through apophasis, by reducing the argument
against poetry to an absurdity. But while being an expert on
cricket in the United Kingdom, or on polka in central Europe,
would not strike us as comical, it would still be of little moment,
as games and dancing are appropriate to idle youth (or hauled out
like bunting, Christmas ornaments, flags and occasional clothing
to dress up public rituals). Neither Oppenheimer nor Graves
believes poetry is frivolous, but they both seem to recognise that
its marginal social status and peculiar relevance to youth place it
at a tangent to mainstream standards of maturity, responsibility,
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gravity and manliness.

In Graves, such concerns trigger the usual powerful defence in
which he attacks those who ridicule childishness as expressing the
lordly distaste of the ‘strict classicist’ for ‘the ungoverned
Romantic, the dislike being apparently founded on a feeling that to
wake this child-spirit in the mind of a grown person is stupid and
even disgusting’ (On English Poetry, p. 69). Approaching thirty,
Graves publicly acknowledged his own ‘ridiculous childishness’
by summoning up the Romantic valorisation of emotion with its
connected valorisation of childhood. In private, Graves showed a
comparable sensitivity; in a letter to Marsh, he writes, with
reference to his poem ‘Finland’: ‘It was made in a poetry game I
played with Sassons once on that set subject. He wrote an
extremely decorative sonnet which though most admirably tooled
and finished had not the true spiritual feeling of my nonsense’.18
In 1925, he elevates nonsense with ‘true spiritual feeling’ to the
stature of ‘poetic unreason’. The OED defines one sense of
‘unreason’ as ‘that which is contrary to, or devoid of, reason’, and
furnishes two quotations for it, the second from the English
philosopher John Grote: ‘That unreason or nonsense which it is
the business of the higher part to convert into knowledge.’
Graves’s 1925 book Poetic Unreason condemns such
conversion, and the ‘business of the higher part’, which it
describes with chilly precision as ‘a system slowly deduced from
the broadest and most impersonal analyses of cause and effect,
capable always of empiric proof’.19 Producing knowledge from
nonsense is a purely cognitive process that values the impersonal
over the personal and the rational over the mythic, and effectively
precludes poiesis. In the section of Poetic Unreason entitled ‘The
illogical element in poetry’, Graves casts William Shakespeare,
‘the master poet’, as the antithesis of ‘conversion’, and his salient,
determining feature is that he ‘insist[s] on his own absurd
courses’.20
Graves clearly understands that he, himself, is behaving
rationally, thinking clearly, writing logical discursive prose, but
this apparent contradiction by no means upends his argument; it is
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only viewed as a flaw if one is being logical, and to judge his

arguments against logic purely according to the laws of logic is to
misjudge them completely. I would suggest that conundrums like
these illustrate the complexity of ‘nonsense’ in Graves’s thought.
Nonsense is not merely the freedom from or the opposite of sense,
as proleptic thought is the opposite of deductive thinking, but a
mode of perception, even a mode in which one can perceive
nonsense and recognise its unique validity as an alternative
epistemology to reason. Thus nonsense epitomises a structure of
consciousness that can coexist with reason, and at least in one
regard may be superior to reason, which can accept no other
model for conscious intelligence than itself. One might even
wonder if nonsense alone is able to discover meaning and value in
both nonsense and reason, inasmuch as we have no logical,
rational explanation for value, wonder, or romantic love.
Appearing the same year as Poetic Unreason, Graves’s
Welchman’s Hose begins with the poem ‘Alice’ and references
Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass. It is a poem D. N. G.
Carter insightfully discusses in Robert Graves: The Lasting Poetic
Achievement. Extolling ‘the singular importance of children and
the world of childhood in Graves’s poetry’, Carter writes that
‘Graves is not a poet of childhood in any regressive, de la Mare-
ish sense, although he is, on occasion, a children’s poet: he has
written for children, and children’s anthologies owe some of their
better inclusions to him. Principally, however, he is interested in
the child’s world for what it reveals about the adult’s’.21 Carter
also adds, perceptively, that Graves’s ‘experience of childhood
and children’ inform ‘the perceptions of his poems’, and that they
are ‘as much a means of understanding life as are his more adult
experiences in love and war’ (p. 145).
Carter’s book is the first to make the claim that ‘childhood and
children’ are of singular importance to Graves – just, I would add,
as they are to understanding Graves’s poetics. The defensiveness
in Carter’s tone – for example, beginning with the negative
exclamation, ‘Graves is not a poet of childhood’, and including a
gratuitous and unfair deprecation of de la Mare – is an indication
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of the state of play. Before him, Graves’s critics had trod uneasily
on this ground, just as Graves had done, if they trod at all.
But in some key ways, Carter’s tentativeness and distancing
distort Graves’s views. In particular, the hackneyed division of
experience into the ‘child’s world’ and the ‘adult’s world’ imports
oversimplified and discomforting ideas about childhood. While
Graves does concede difference to children in ‘Babylon’, he tends
more often to treat of phenomena with greater subtlety and
complexity, eschewing metaphorical worlds for meticulous
observation and reasoning.
The relevant distinction Graves does draw in ‘Alice’ is between
the reality behind the mirror and the materially actual world of
mid-Victorian England. In the poem bearing her name, Alice is
never relegated to an existential children’s table, nor are her
thoughts and perceptions characterised as childlike. She is defined
specifically as ‘courageous’, ‘of a speculative bent’, set on fun,
possessed of ‘British pride’ and of ‘uncommon sense’. She is also
capable of sophisticated understandings despite the fact that she is
a child:

For Alice though a child could understand

That neither did this chance-discovered land
Make nohow or contrariwise the clean
Dull round of mid-Victorian routine,
Nor did Victoria’s golden rule extend
Beyond the glass [. . .].

In the phrase ‘though a child’, Graves seems to be subverting the

same generalisations about children he is invoking, just as Carroll
had done, which are uncritically and perhaps inadvertently re-
inscribed in Carter’s analysis. Alice astutely observes that the
usual physical laws do not apply in this ‘chance-discovered land’,
and her ‘uncommon sense’ prevents her from falling into ‘A trap
in which the scientist would fall’ by assuming ‘That queens and
kittens are identical’.
The trap is spurious deductive reasoning. There is no basis on
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which one might assert that reason has any explanatory power in
the world behind the mirror, the world discovered, and perhaps
also governed, by chance and not causality. The Red Queen’s
apparent metamorphosis back into Kitten can only dictate that
queens and kittens are identical if one tosses aside the rest of the
story. By contrast with disempowered reason, Alice’s ‘uncommon
sense’ is exemplary, and the rare agency intrinsically linked to
Alice’s unique personhood by whose authority Graves, or the
poem’s Gravesian persona, capriciously abandons his narrative at
line 33 to conjecture (with the garrulousness of Alice herself) that
‘this chance-discovered land’ is the very same land

Where empty hearses turn about; thereafter

Begins that lubberland of dream and laughter,
The red-and-white-flower-spangled hedge, the grass
Where Apuleius pastured his Gold Ass,
Where young Gargantua made whole holiday . . . .

However whimsical the tone, the reference to Apuleius is

pointed and effective. In Poetic Unreason Graves uses Apuleius’s
pasturage as an emblem of poetic unreason: ‘In Poetry one is
continually straying into the bounds of a Thessaly like the land
Apuleius celebrated, where magic is supreme and where, therefore,
things happen which realistically minded strangers find difficult to
understand’ (p. 125). Explicitly, by the authority of Apuleius (and
implicitly, by that of individual taste), Graves celebrates the
universality of Alice’s ‘lubberland’, and Alice’s personhood.22 By
association he seems also to be implying that his own nursery
rhymes are sanctioned by personal taste. After all, Shakespeare is
not the paradigmatic master poet because he pursues absurd
courses merely, but because he pursues his own absurd courses.
For himself, Graves found the absurd course of nonsense and
nursery rhyme.
A fascination with childhood and with children’s texts is evident
in Graves’s choice of material, a choice that might appear
childishly oppositional – evoking Georgian nostalgia only to
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abandon it for ‘epistemology in a mock-solemn vein’ (Carter, p.

147). His notions of childhood are likewise original: he evokes
conventional ideals of childhood but subverts them by stressing
Alice’s individuality. She is not Blake’s every child, but child and
adult blended together, neither child nor adult, but, as the poem
makes plain by declaring that she is ‘the prime heroine of the
nation’, the unimprovable original. By refusing to relativise Alice,
Graves circumvents a static representation of the child as an icon,
as Judith Plotz writes, ‘of fixity rather than growth or change’, a
social construction the Victorians had taken from the Romantics.23
This dull, static figure, whether Blake’s piper or James Barrie’s
Peter Pan, and its concomitant cultural binaries such as ‘world of
the child’ and the ‘adult world’, are the exact verities that ‘Alice’
destabilises. The (bad) scientist might assume that ironclad
physical laws serve to describe or even determine essential
correspondences; despite their apparent differences, ironically,
Alice knows better.
Carter’s sensitivity to Graves’s engagement with childhood
seems to fail him, although not his sympathetic grasp of Graves’s
purpose, when he declares ‘the child’s world is also the artist’s’
(p. 147). These are artificial categories foreign to the poem,
however proximate to Graves’s sentiment. An extraordinary child
like Alice may enter the world ‘of dream and laughter’, but so
might the readers of Apuleius and Rabelais; so might Graves and
so might his readers, many of whom will be adults. As well as
legitimising and validating children’s texts, ‘Alice’ offers the
same opportunity for open-ended imaginative play to his readers,
all of them, a point we take from Graves’s decision to make
‘Alice’ the first poem of Welchman’s Hose, and it was in the same
spirit that he eventually published a selection of his poems as The
Penny Fiddle: Poems for Children.
During the next thirty years Graves’s production of nursery
rhymes seems to taper off, although he continues to write them in
addition to nonsense rhymes, poems about childhood, children’s
poems and poems inspired by children, in which childhood is a
striking, salient element: [‘The Untidy Man’], ‘Lift-Boy’,
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‘Brother’, ‘Flying Crooked’, ‘Parent to Children’, ‘The Beach’,

‘The Death Room’, ‘My Name and I’, ‘To Lucia at Birth’ and
‘Yes’, for example. In his essays, he continued to use children’s
texts rhetorically, as though they were parables, to exemplify ideas
and attitudes. He concludes his analysis of Milton’s L’Allegro, in
a 1957 essay, ‘Legitimate Criticism of Poetry’, by drawing a
surprising contrast between L’Allegro and two songs ‘of mirthful
invocation’:24 one, Ariel’s song ‘Come Unto These Yellow Sands’
from The Tempest, I. 2, whose lines ‘Hark! Hark! [...] The watch-
dogs bark’ seem to echo the nursery rhyme ‘Hark, hark / The dogs
do bark’,25 and the nursery rhyme, ‘Girls and boys, come out to
play: / The moon doth shine as bright as day’ (p. 43). As well as
reinforcing his reputation as a cranky iconoclast by this
comparison, Graves reminded audiences of his unfaltering belief
in the poetic artlessness of nursery rhyme, and asserted the
pleasing complexity of nonsense by teasing out a reasonable,
carefully organised, lively and cogent argument – though some
may disagree with it or with its methodological principles – from
an apparently nonsensical opinion.
Quoting Shakespeare, Graves is obliquely alluding to Milton’s
own homage to Shakespeare in L’Allegro (‘Or sweetest
Shakespeare, Fancy’s child’), in effect agreeing with Milton that
Shakespeare is the better poet. And, putting a further strain on
what might generally be considered a legitimate use of criticism,
Graves also implies that Milton had waived his right to object to
his poem being ranked below ‘Girls and Boys Come Out to Play’
by his tribute to Shakespeare, particularly in its wording. Part of
Graves’s fun peeks out from the margins of the joke. He has made
Milton seem slightly absurd because of his use of the decorative
conceit ‘Fancy’s child’, in which Milton apparently wanted to
signify the imagination; but Graves, in preferring nursery verse to
L’Allegro, presumes that he intended to signify something more
like fantasticality (as in Shakespeare’s line from Love’s Labour’s
Lost: ‘This childe of Fancie that Armado hight’), or personal taste
(as he, Graves, is exhibiting in his tour de force of an absurd
critique). Shakespeare, Milton, the author of ‘Boys and Girls
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Come Out to Play’ and he, himself, are all writing what comes
nearest their fancy, and only personal taste has the right to tell us
which is better.
I am merely suggesting that, with cunning and erudition,
‘Legitimate Criticism of Poetry’ repeats the argument of the
superiority of nonsense to reason; for nonsense can simulate both
the nonsensical and the reasonable, but reason can always only be
reasonable. (The reason of L’Allegro melts away, but the nonsense
remains: reason is a lossy technology, but nonsense, lossless.)
Although, of course, Graves can be deadly serious about
defending nonsense, in his critique of Milton his style is
demonstrably tongue-in-cheek, even childish, modelling the
freedom, disinterest and expressive range of poetic nonsense.
5 Pens in Hand also contains the children’s poem, ‘A Plea to
Boys and Girls’:

You learned Lear’s Nonsense Rhymes by heart, not rote;

You learned Pope’s Iliad by rote, not heart;
These terms should be distinguished if you quote
My verses, children – keep them poles apart –
And call the man a liar who says I wrote
All that I wrote in love, for love of art.

Graves unabashedly associates his poems with nonsense –

modestly according them the same stature as Edward Lear’s (as
Eliot had not done in his 1933 Five-Finger Exercises). Despite
being addressed to children, ‘A Plea to Boys and Girls’ is
nonetheless somewhat liminal, in that young readers could not be
expected to have a sharp sense of either romantic love or autotelic
art, thus depriving the final line of force; and, while adults could
make the distinction, the allusions to memorising Pope and Lear
would seem strained to them, as would the idea of learning
Graves’s poems by heart.
But if we count children the more plausible audience, then we
might consider that Graves gendered the poem’s title, not merely
to echo the nursery rhyme he praised in his critique of Milton (and
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which he had included in The Less Familiar Nursery Rhymes

(1927),26 but to symbolise the importance of romantic love, in
contravention of the norms of children’s publishing. While he
omitted ‘A Plea to Boys and Girls’ from The Penny Fiddle,
published only two years later, Graves incorporated three
(melancholy) love poems, ‘One Hard Look’, ‘The Hills of May’
and ‘Love Without Hope’. We might account for their exquisite,
idiosyncratic presence by the implicit claim in ‘A Plea to Boys
and Girls’ that one must recognise the unique importance of love
in any discussion of poetry, at any level. And we might see the
relationship here of romantic love and children’s poetry as a later,
more elegant version of the relationship Graves had earlier
proposed to Marsh between ‘spiritual feeling’ and nonsense, thus
once again bringing nonsense under the auspices of the White
Goddess.
Given Graves’s history and predilections, the publication of a
book of poems for children in 1960 was hardly nostalgic
indulgence, though surely in some personal sense it did enact a
return. If it is the realisation of his earlier project of 1917–20,
which should help to persuade us that Graves’s original inspiration
was not commercial, The Penny Fiddle nonetheless embodies
attitudes about childhood and children that would still seem
progressive today, and ideas about reading and writing poetry that
could serve to illustrate arguments he was making in lectures and
essays published during this period in The Crowning Privilege and
the Oxford Addresses on Poetry.27
One of the features of the 1960 Penny Fiddle that distinguishes it
from a simple poetic sampler compiled by a doting older poet for
young readers is Graves’s scrupulous re-working, as noted by
Dunstan Ward, of earlier poems, ‘Robinson Crusoe’, ‘The Six
Badgers’, and ‘Jock o’ Binnorie’ (Collected Poems, III, pp. 439–
41). William Graves remembers his father used to ‘sing/recite’
verses from ‘Robinson Crusoe’ to him as a child, enunciating
‘pork’ with a little gust of breath that, as the lyrics say, would
blow the candle out (see figure 2).28 In an email to the Canadian
poet JonArno Lawson, Tomas Graves, the dedicatee of The Penny
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Fiddle, said he felt his father’s ‘interest in children’s poetry was

more of a literary than a family matter’.29 Graves also made
minor, and temporary, alterations to ‘What Did I Dream’, and
composed an entirely new poem, ‘How and Why’. He radically
reconceptualised the title poem of the volume to articulate a
philosophical premise that serves as a key to the entire sequence
of twenty-three poems. In the poem’s earlier version, published in
Collins’ Children’s Annual in 1926 (figure 3), the narrator is a
jolly young would-be musician who discovers that his fiddle-
shaped toy will not make music and tosses it aside, vowing that he
will save up his money to buy a real fiddle, and even, if need be,
sell his boots and go barefoot in the snow.30
The revision introduces a second character, a poor (penniless)
girl,31 who picks up the rejected toy and teases music from its
painted strings, at which the boy sighs, longing to have it back. He
has no thought of the money he will spend on a real fiddle –
paradoxically, the toy is real – ‘But, alas, she would not let it go’.
In the magical fiddle, the revised poem enacts a transvaluation in
which the materially worthless thing is also, simultaneously, the
sacred. Like the penny fiddle, a children’s poem can be both the
medium of true, ethereal music and still only a toy.
Unlike the mock-heroic figure in the younger work, this
melancholy boy is not inspired by art but by a mysterious process
with a powerful sensual component. The music (and by
association, the music of the poem), functions as a synecdoche.
The mock-heroic boy, with thoughts of plums and buns and
fiddlers who care not for the falling snow, is quintessentially a
child, with the world view of a child. Although the boy of the later
poem is also a child, longing has darkened his view. His childhood
has unobtrusively ended. (This understated aspect of the poem is
strengthened and recontextualised by the second poem in the
volume, ‘Allie’, with its sweetly obvious, heartrending symbol of
an April sunset – while the mysterious Gypsy girl, and the boy’s
longing, reoccur transformed in ‘The Hills of May’, the twelfth
poem.)
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Fig. 2
Graves’s manuscript additions to his copy of The Less Familiar Nursery Rhymes (1927)
(William Graves collection)
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Fig. 3
First publication of ‘The Penny Fiddle’, Collins’ Children’s Annual (1926)

The wistful music of the poem’s final line of anapestic trimeter –

‘But, alas, she would not let it go’ – directs the reader’s attention
toward the last line of Blake’s ‘Pretty Rose Tree’: ‘And her thorns
were my only delight’, placing the two poems in virtual
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dialogue.32 (If children memorised Pope and Lear then, surely,

they knew Blake.) While introducing the work in hand, ‘The
Penny Fiddle’ also introduces the ekphrastic element of poetry,
modelling its capacity to bring together poems separated by time
and space to engage in a mutual interpretation of symbolic
structures and meanings – a kind of creative hermeneutics. As
well as performing a Gravesian interpretation of ‘Pretty Rose
Tree’, ‘The Penny Fiddle’ holds itself open to a Blakean
interpretation.
‘Warning to Children’, a 1929 poem whose hard, objective and
self-reflexive character is in the epistemological vein of ‘Alice’
also signals that in 1960 Graves had something up his sleeve with
The Penny Fiddle. By passing over more obviously childlike
poems, such as ‘I’d Love to Be a Fairy’s Child’ and ‘Cherry
Time’, and making ‘Warning to Children’ the volume’s
concluding poem, and thus perhaps a dialectical counterpoint to
‘The Penny Fiddle’, Graves establishes the sequence within a
discursive context that recognises certain principles of
Romanticism and properties of myth. In Poetic Unreason, he
claimed that nonsense – or ‘so-called nonsense’ – and myth were
consubstantial, and, along with Romanticism, were equally
despised: ‘Romanticism [...] has long been banished to the nursery
[...] the one place where there is an audience not too sophisticated
to appreciate ancient myths and so-called nonsense rhymes of
greater or lesser antiquity’ (p. 126).
It would be a tricky argument to make that Graves composed
‘Warning to Children’ solely with an unsophisticated audience in
mind, in spite of its title, and yet he might have expected children
to respond to the music and apparent nonsense of it while being
agreeably tickled by its elusiveness, as adults are. Two years
earlier, Graves had argued for the full status of nursery rhymes as
poems in the introduction to The Less Familiar Nursery Rhymes,
declaring ‘the best of the older nursery rhymes are nearer to poetry
than the greater part of the Oxford Book of English Verse’ (p. 13).
Cannot we infer that in 1929 Graves also believed children were
full-status readers, certainly capable of appreciating myths and
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‘nonsense rhymes of [. . . ] lesser antiquity’, just as he was, better

than the greater part of the adult population? And in 1960,
embroiled in a public campaign against, variously, modernists or
modernism,33 or the literary establishment,34 that he hoped to drive
home that point in the form of a children’s book that contained
some of his best and most complicated poems? That in this period
he considered youth essential to poetry he makes clear in his essay
‘Sweeney Among the Blackbirds’, twice quoting by way of
illustration this stanza from a poem by the sixteenth century poet,
Thomas Vaux:

For Reason me denies

This youthful, idle rhyme
And day by day to me she cries:
‘Leave off these toys in time!’

Siding with the young, with children, Graves would symbolically

have been asserting his bona fides as a poet.
The progress of Graves’s nursery rhymes toward greater
philosophic complexity (from ‘Babylon’ to ‘Warning to
Children’) coincides with his retreat from Georgianism. One can
see its genesis in a letter to Marsh of 17 December 1921, in which
Graves defends another difficult poem, ‘The Feather Bed’: ‘You
acknowledge that there is passion and spirit in my new writing,
but you can’t catch the drift’. He also rebuts a charge Marsh laid
against the poem, of being a freak of fancy, stating, ‘there is no
harm in freaks of fancy if they are subtly related to a constructive
purpose’. Answering what we infer to have been Marsh’s
objections to the manic persona of the ‘Feather Bed’, Graves
concedes that he ‘thinks in extravagant & apparently irrelevant
pictures, but always they have a reference & a bearing force on the
trouble at hand’.35
The phrase ‘thinks in extravagant & apparently irrelevant
pictures’ suggests a metaphorical bridge or at least a point of
comparison between the apparent irrelevancy of nonsense and the
poem ‘In Broken Images’, which appears alongside ‘Warning to
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Children’ in Poems 1929.36

‘In Broken Images’ found no favour with Douglas Day, the first
critic to produce a book-length study of Graves’s poetry, who
thought its ‘total abstraction’ was ‘uncharacteristic of Graves’, and
dismissed it as a ‘slight poem’, a charge often levelled at Graves’s
nursery rhymes.37 Although no one has ever deemed ‘In Broken
Images’ to be a nursery rhyme, it has certain features in common
with nursery rhymes. Its binary form (which Graves revisited in
other poems, such as ‘Despite and Still’, ‘The Portrait’, and ‘My
Name and I’) proliferates in nursery rhymes, such as ‘Jack and
Jill’, ‘The Lion and the Unicorn’, and many lesser known rhymes:

Margery Mutton-pie and Johnny Bo-Peep

They met together in Gracechurch Street;
In and out, in and out, over the way,
Oh, said Johnny, it’s chop-nose day.38

One’s immediate impression of ‘total abstraction’ is challenged

by a sense of irony – or a cow-jumped-over-the-moon logic – that
inheres in ‘In Broken Images’. Although the sceptical narrator
who contrasts himself with the facile, self-confident, and notably
silent, other, seems satisfied with the self-flattering distinctions he
draws, the distinctions seem to fall apart before the formal unities
of the poem. Seeming to mimic the ‘him-and-me’ binary, each
stanza consists of two paired lines,39 and each line is similarly an
end-stopped independent clause posited in the form of a
mathematical statement. The initial stanza expresses a thesis and
antithesis, which every succeeding stanza develops and reiterates:

He is quick, thinking in clear images;

I am slow, thinking in broken images.

He becomes dull, trusting to his clear images;

I become sharp, mistrusting my broken images,

The poem marches along in lockstep like this until it appears to

arrive at an obvious and predetermined conclusion in a last laconic
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stanza:

He in a new confusion of his understanding;

I in a new understanding of my confusion.

If one overlooks the fuzziness of the poem’s logic, which teeters

on the brink of, if not plunging into the heart of, nonsense, and
sees it only as a clever contrast of the sort Graves had made in
Poetic Unreason, then, no doubt, Day would be justified in his
dismissal. However, the matching lines, spare vocabulary (a
device that might remind us of the epitaph of ‘Interlude’), metrical
and phonological similarities knit the distinctions into a ritualised
and highly artificial call and response, so that even as semantic
difference exerts a centrifugal force through the rational elements
of the poem, pulling the nucleus of the poem apart, the syntactic,
intuitive, musical, associations centripetally hold it together.
Although ‘In Broken Images’ seems to declare, A not B, it also
posits an overriding co-identification, which the final chiasmus
clarifies: A and B: mirror opposites.40
One might suggest that the poem invites a double reading: one
clear reading trained on the logic of the text (Day’s disappointed
pure or ‘total abstraction’), and a broken reading that instances a
kind of ‘strange loop’,41 where musical correspondences at
variance to narrative contradictions set the poem revolving in
place, a version of the dynamic of ‘Warning to Children’, and a
type of poetic nonsense.
In On English Poetry, Graves shares his poetic strategy in
language that, for our own purposes, is as notable as the concept:

The underlying associations of each word in a poem form close

combinations of emotion unexpressed by the bare verbal pattern.
In this way the poet may be compared with a father piecing
together a picture-block puzzle for his children. He surprises them
at last by turning over the completed picture, and showing them
that by the act of assembling the scattered parts of ‘Red Riding
Hood with the Basket of Food’ he has all the while been building
up unnoticed underneath another scene of the tragedy – ‘The Wolf
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eating the Grandmother’. (p. 24)

Fuzzy logic is also a determining element of ‘Warning to

Children’, but beneath its fuzzy surface there is a keener and more
obvious argument against abstraction, taking the form of a
reductio ad absurdum of the rationalist proposition in Peter
Markie’s ‘Rationalism vs. Empiricism’ that ‘our concepts and
knowledge are [inherent and] gained independently of sense
experience’.42
Peter Markie further notes that rationalists ‘argue that there are
cases where the content of our concepts or knowledge outstrips
the information that sense experience can provide’.
The unmediated abstraction in ‘In Broken Images’ eventuates in
a thin, back of the napkin analysis. In ‘Warning to Children’
unmediated rationality perpetuates itself in an infinite regress as
the mind endlessly performs the same unvarying, meaningless act,
repetitively understanding a universe constituted by the same
familiar, albeit mysterious, understanding:

Children, leave the string alone!

For who dares undo the parcel
Finds himself at once inside it,
On the island, in the fruit,
Blocks of slate about his head,
Finds himself enclosed by dappled
Green and red, enclosed by yellow
Tawny nets, enclosed by black
And white acres of dominoes,
With the same brown paper parcel
Still unopened on his knee.

Of course, children can resist rationality no longer than they can

resist growing up (like the songbirds of ‘Babylon’), but perhaps
they need not be entirely defenceless; ‘Warning to Children’
models an alternative to rationalism in the illogical or magical
factor that inhabits the poem’s playful humour, drumming
rhythms and luminous contradictions (‘greatness, rareness,
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muchness / Fewness’), the factor that makes poetry coherent. Like

the reason of the rationalists, the poetic is not posited as a function
of language or art, or the poet’s heightened awareness, or beliefs,
but as the super-sensory and primary. It is, once again, ‘the land
Apuleius celebrated, where magic is supreme’.43
The anti-philosophical argument of ‘Warning to Children’ is
repeated in other poems in The Penny Fiddle, such as ‘The
Magical Picture’, which criticises empiricism, the epistemological
twin to rationalism. Again, in broad terms, empiricists develop
accounts of the information on which knowledge is based. Markie
writes that empiricists believe ‘if experience cannot provide the
concept or knowledge the rationalists cite, then we don’t have
them’.44
‘The Magical Picture’, the nineteenth poem in The Penny Fiddle,
asks to be read as a warning against empiricism. The broken
mirror ‘glinting on the roadway’, with which the poem begins,
serves as a metaphor of experience – the empiricists’ ‘given’. The
mirror is discovered by four characters: Tom (a child), his parents
(Jack, a sailor, and Mary) and a priest, who peer into it and take
the visions they behold of their own hopes and fears for
knowledge of objective reality. The child perceives a scary goblin,
Jack, a portrait of Admiral Nelson in his dashing youth, and Mary,
the seductive lover of her possibly adulterous, seafaring husband.
The pompous priest discovers ‘a saint of glory’ in it and decrees
the broken mirror to be an icon.
While for empiricists sense experience is our only source of
ideas, ‘The Magical Picture’ casts experience qua what the broken
mirror offers as hermeneutically empty, and the knowledge we
supposedly derive from it, sheer fantasy. What is lacking in ‘The
Magical Mirror’ world is warrant,45 some mechanism to
adjudicate upon the sensory data and perceptions generated by the
mirror, which it cannot provide. Trusting the mirror for knowledge
places us at the mercy of our own – and each other’s – fantasies,
or nightmares.
Graves obviously liked this notion and made a similar comment
in ‘A Child’s Nightmare’, an earlier, harsher poem published in
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Fairies and Fusiliers, later suppressed. Although not included in

The Penny Fiddle sequence, ‘A Child’s Nightmare’ can shed light
on its structure and on the underlying meanings of ‘The Magical
Picture’. While Kersnowski discusses it at length, arguing very
persuasively that Graves’s war trauma was mediated by the
recollected terrors of childhood, it is, I think, an incomplete
analysis, focused almost exclusively on the external circumstances
of the poem at the expense of the poem’s structures and poetic
content. In the narrative, a wounded soldier recalls the memory of
a childhood dream in which a mysterious figure stands at his
bedside repeating the word ‘cat’. Like Poe’s dismal raven, the
monosyllabic utterance awakens nameless terror, which Graves
calls nonsense:

But there’s a Nonsense that can keep

Horror bristling round the head,
When a voice cruel and flat
Says forever, ‘Cat! … Cat! … Cat!’

Although in a very different tone, the voice ‘cruel and flat’ and
the broken mirror of ‘The Magical Picture’ symbolise one and the
same thing: the incomprehensible source of a steady, never-ending
current of trivial information, or nonsense (in the worst sense).
One might read finality or death into the unwavering presence of
the voice, but I suggest it may be more precisely grasped as
emptiness, a lack of revelation, the blanket meaninglessness of life
and death. The voice is a symbol that denies the explanatory
power of its symbolism, a token of a type it repudiates and hence a
category error, which is an analogue to the broken mirror that
neither reflects what is before it, nor provides illumination. It is a
mirror without true mirroring properties: hence it is figuratively as
well as literally a broken mirror.
The rationalist charge against empiricism, ‘no empirical lesson
about how things are can warrant such knowledge of how they
ought to be’,46 might also serve as the poem’s epigram. To warrant
knowledge about how things ought to be requires an instrument of
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revelation, epitomised in The Penny Fiddle as the child’s toy

fiddle, or, perhaps more particularly, the toy fiddle in the hands of
the ironically inconsequential Gypsy girl: the materially valueless
thing from which absolute value flows. If the music of the penny
fiddle is poetry, then the only truth is poetic truth.
One further complexity of ‘A Magical Picture’ is the problem of
the status or truth value of our interpretation of the poem. The
magical picture (that is, what each character sees in the mirror)
signifies the poem itself: directly, by name, as well as analogically.
If what the zany characters think they see when they gaze at the
magical picture is unreliable and abets self deception, then so
might what we think we understand when we read ‘The Magical
Picture’. Confoundingly, the poem seems to skip off the dissecting
table. By cautioning us to view with scepticism our understanding
of the poem, as merely another object within the category of
empirical data, it points out the dissembling nature of experience
and the unavailability of rational truth. The magical picture before
our eyes beguiles (frightens, emboldens, seduces, humbles,
mocks) us all.
Read in isolation, ‘The Magical Picture’ might be understood to
be making the point Marianne Moore articulates in the poem
‘New York’: ‘One must stand outside and laugh / since to go in is
to be lost’.47 However, in the context of The Penny Fiddle, the
exemplary, enigmatic ‘The Penny Fiddle’ provides a different and
I think more satisfying solution. The penny fiddle points us toward
the transpersonal object of poetic vision, or what is intended by
the ritualised act of music, or writing poetry, namely poetic truth.
In 1959, Graves told Huw P. Wheldon ‘I think of poetic truth,
which is what I am trying to get, as quite distinct from historic
truth or scientific truth or any sort of rational truth. It is a sort of
supra-rational truth’.48 When Wheldon asks if poetic truth is not
religious, Graves replies, ‘it comes very close to the natural faith
of religion’, which recalls his comment to Marsh forty-two years
earlier about ‘the true spiritual feeling of [his] nonsense’, and
brings together nonsense (or his ‘so-called nonsense’) with supra-
rational truth.
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Supra-rational truth rescued ‘In Broken Images’ from the charge

of total abstraction, and it also illuminates a second, doubled,
reading of ‘A Child’s Nightmare’. Readers must infer from a basic
reading of the poem that, as far as truth value is concerned,
experience is a dead end, a bruising insult to the human quest for
meaning, as I suggested above. It is merely ‘Nonsense that can
keep / [the] Horror [of an aimless, painful life] bristling round the
head’. However, its doubled reading amalgamates the poem’s
specific insight, having been taken in at a first reading, and
contemplates it within the context of the poem; it then makes us
aware that insight, a qualitatively different kind of experience, can
be expressed in exactly the same language as ‘Nonsense that can
keep / Horror bristling round the head’. The ‘Horror’ in this sense
depends from Rudolph Otto’s characterisation of the numinous in
Das Heilige, as the mysterium tremendum et fascinans, which
entails ‘the feeling of terror’, ‘awe’, ‘and religious fear before the
fascinating mystery [. . .] in which perfection of being flowers’.49
We have an example of the tremendum of course in Graves’s quite
similar description of what occurs in the presence of a true poem:
‘the hairs stand on end, the skin crawls and a shiver runs down the
spine’.50 Horror bristles ‘round the head’ in ‘A Child’s Nightmare’
because one’s hairs stand on end, and because revealed truth is
supra-rational, a truth above the head. Graves demonstrates the
paradoxical capacity of poetic truth to co-exist within the radically
different quiddity of experience by combining two essentially
incompatible meanings into the same poetic lines: A and B.
So, keeping this idea of a non-Aristotelian ontology, we can
conclude our analysis of ‘The Magical Picture’ by arguing that
whereas the apprehensions of the zany personalities are
fundamentally in error, being purely subjective experiences
guided by a flawed epistemology, our apprehensions about ‘The
Magical Picture’, informed by the paradoxical caveat that one
should mistrust one’s apprehensions, are legitimate, grounded in
experience though they are, because they are guided by the
epistemology of poetic truth. Poetic truth frees us from the
paralysing effect of ‘The Magical Picture’. The penny fiddle of
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course is another, more poetically self-conscious paradoxical

symbol, and the guiding wisdom of The Penny Fiddle by which all
of the poems in the volume are illuminated. Graves leaves no
doubt about this ‘higher’ purpose by making it the first poem in
the volume, and privileging its title as the volume’s title.
The three poems from The Penny Fiddle I have been discussing,
‘The Penny Fiddle’, ‘Warning to Children’, and ‘The Magical
Picture’, share the unusual characteristic of objectifying the
experience of reading the poem. Reading places one inside of the
poem (looking, untying, playing are all variations on the theme of
reading) and one’s impressions of the poem become part of its
hermeneutic deposit. Becoming aware of this aspect, one enters
into a dynamic process of poetic oscillation, in which analysis
vibrates back and forth between discourse and meta-discourse,
almost seeming, I think, an exemplification of how to read.51
Because The Penny Fiddle plucks these poems from various
corners of Graves’s oeuvre and brings them into meaningful
proximity – under, as it were, the sign of the magical fiddle (a
Gravesian inversion of the classical lyre, symbol of Apollonian
poetry) – it calls attention to this dynamic heuristically, also
calling attention to its dependence on the reader’s performance of
the text, which it further suggests is a linchpin to a mindful and
visceral understanding of poetry.
Thus, on the most basic, childlike level, reading The Penny
Fiddle functions as a game: making meanings from the oscillating
poem creates vibrations from the invisible strings of the imaginary
fiddle. On a more sophisticated, but no less childlike level,
understanding the operation of the metaphor critically and valuing
it in accordance with the argument and inhering myth of the poem
‘The Penny Fiddle’, depends on recognising that the collection
recursively gestures toward itself, toward the reader, toward the
plasticity and encyclopedic inclusiveness of poetry, and toward
poetic truth. All of these elements vibrate simultaneously. Just as
poetic truth surpasses the form and fiction of any individual poem,
and any single (limiting) interpretation, it surpasses this or any
other limited sequence of poems, and, hence contextualises the
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invocation here of other poems and poets: William Blake’s ‘Pretty

Rose Tree’, de la Mare’s ‘Melmillo’ in ‘Allie’, Hamlet in ‘The
Forbidden Play’, Macbeth and Lear in ‘Jock o’Binnorie’;
Coleridge’s ‘Work Without Hope’ in ‘Love Without Hope’52 and
Donne’s ‘The Sunne Rising’ in ‘What Did I Dream’. By placing
his own lyrics within this fertile, unruly matrix, Graves seems to
be suggesting, to wise children, that the final warrant of poetic
truth is the immanent and transcendent spirit of English poetry.

Rutgers University, New Jersey.

NOTES
1
Graves to Siegfried Sassoon, ‘July’ [1918]. Berg Collection, New York
Public Library. Dominic Hibberd paraphrases this passage in ‘“The
Patchwork Flag” (1918): An Unrecorded Book by Robert Graves’,
Review of English Studies, new series, 41, 164 (1990), 521–32: ‘Graves
said he was thinking of children (Nancy was pregnant) and that he
would succeed more with children’s verse than with anything else’ (p.
522). Graves’s own words say something quite different. The full
passage of the letter reads: ‘All of which just gives you a sort of idea of
what I’m thinking about & that’s the children we’re going to have:
awful fun it’s going to be because if ever I make any name for myself
for poetry & stories, it’s the children’s stunt that I’m going to succeed
in, I’m sure.’ It strikes me as obvious that Graves is looking forward to
having children because they go hand in hand with the spirit of his
writing, in which he is hoping to make a name for himself.
‘The children’s stunt’ is a slightly obsolete and perhaps misleading
locution. The term now carries the implication of a ‘gimmick’, or
‘trickery’, but it is likely Graves meant something else. OED 1b gives
one possible usage he might have picked up during the war: ‘An
enterprise set on foot with the object of gaining reputation or signal
advantage. In soldiers’ language often vaguely: an attack or advance, a
“push”, “move”.’ There is the possibility as well that he had in mind
OED 1d: ‘In wider use, a piece of business, an act, enterprise, or exploit.’
In fact, Graves might have read the term recently in Edward Marsh’s
Memoir of Rupert Brooke (1918), in which it occurs in a 1913 letter
from Brooke to Marsh: ‘Then I do my pet boyish-modesty stunt and go
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pink all over; and everyone thinks it too delightful’ (p. 98). Brooke is
poking fun at the strangers he is meeting who seem mawkish in their
praise for his poems, and perhaps, implicitly, at his own innocent
gratitude of which he is slightly ashamed. Sassoon, to whom Graves is
writing, had told him to man up in his poetry, and ‘stunt’ might have
echoed Sassoon’s attitude or served to remind him that Rupert Brooke,
himself, had similar boyish tendencies.
2
Robert Graves, Fairies and Fusiliers (London: Heinemann, 1917).
3
Graves to Edward Marsh, 13 January 1919, Berg Collection, New
York Public Library. Frank Kersnowski cites this unpublished letter in
The Early Poetry of Robert Graves. However, his paraphrase of this
passage, ‘Graves was confident in the lasting value of poems he called
“the Nursery Rhymes,” such as “Henry Was a Worthy King,” and
“Careless Lady”’ (p. 103), slightly underplays Graves’s admiration
although it highlights his originality. It may be originality or humility
that moves Graves to suggest the nursery rhymes may be the best poems
in the volume, but he does in fact say it.
4
Robert Graves, The Penny Fiddle: Poems for Children (London:
Cassell, 1960). That children’s poetry in general, and the first Penny
Fiddle in particular, possessed merely commercial interest for Graves is
a commonly held attitude (one might call it a misconception), which
tends to lean heavily on Graves’s letter of 18 May 1920 to the literary
agents, James B. Pinker and Son, about the Penny Fiddle manuscript
(Graves to E. Pinker, Berg Collection, New York Public Library).
Unlike most of the surviving correspondence to Pinker, this particular
letter runs to several pages and includes fascinatingly detailed
instructions regarding the printing, illustration, musical settings and
marketing of the volume. The financial aspect of publication is of
considerable interest to Graves, and he unequivocally asserts: ‘it must
come out by this Christmas, for urgent financial reasons’. Few of his
business letters of this period show so much care for marketing;
however, all of them possess a strong business orientation. They are,
after all, business letters. And while they have a contribution to make,
must we conclude from them that Graves wrote for purely business
reasons? Besides, there is much more to this letter than marketing. None
of Graves’s letters to Pinker show as much feeling for the preparation of
a manuscript, and despite the imminent financial crisis he is facing,
Graves maintains a flexible determination to keep the manuscript as is.
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‘The book to suit the publisher can, at a pinch, be lengthened or

shortened by two or three rhymes, but we do not want to do this and do
not want to be dictated to by the publishers about which rhymes shall go
or stay’. Even in extremis, the integrity of the volume takes precedence
over commercial viability.
5
Graves is probably referring to the china shop of Thomas Goode,
which began in 1827. Steven Rattner declared it ‘the most famous (and
expensive) china shop in London’. See Steven Rattner, ‘200 Years of
Fine Pottery’, New York Times, 25 April 1982
<http://www.nytimes.com/1982/04/25/travel/200-years-of-fine-
pottery.html?pagewanted=all> [accessed 4 October 2012].
The poem reads:

Friends of man, there are but three

The horse, the dog, the apple tree;
The docile horse, that draws the plough;
The faithful dog that barks ‘bow wow’;
The apple tree with fruit for me
As I will show you, here and now.

In Robert Graves: The Assault Heroic: 1895–1926 (London:

Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1986), Richard Perceval Graves writes that
during this period, Robert and Nancy were in ‘a world of their own at a
tangent to the normal world’. He comments as well that Graves was
happily writing ‘nursery rhymes, songs and ballads’, and that his songs
made him ‘a great deal of money’ (p. 194).
6
Graves to Marsh, 18 October 1916, Berg Collection.
7
Robert Graves, Good-bye to All That: An Autobiography (London:
Cape, 1929).
8
Richard Perceval Graves, Robert Graves: The Assault Heroic, p. 147.
9
While Marsh helped to preserve the manuscript of ‘The Patchwork
Flag’, now in the New York Public Library, the manuscript of the first
Penny Fiddle has not been traced, and its full contents are a matter of
conjecture, inference and guesswork.
10
Frank L. Kersnowski, The Early Poetry of Robert Graves: The
Goddess Beckons (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002), p. 89.
Country Sentiment contained seven of the twenty-three poems in the
1960 edition of The Penny Fiddle, two of which appeared previously in
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the first and second issues of The Owl (May and October 1919), with
Nancy’s illustrations.
11
Robert Graves, Complete Poems, ed. by Beryl Graves and Dunstan
Ward, 3 vols (Manchester: Carcanet, 1999). All quotations of Graves’s
poems are from this edition.
12
Robert Graves, from Poetic Unreason, quoted in R. P. Graves, Robert
Graves: The Assault Heroic, p. 288.
13
These lines are not present in the original version of the poem, ‘In
Dedication’, which prefaces the 1948 edition of The White Goddess.
14
Martin Seymour-Smith, Robert Graves: His Life and Work (New
York: Holt, 1983), p. 401.
15
Robert Graves, Poems 1938–1945 (London: Cassell, 1945); letter to
Marsh, 12 July 1917, Berg Collection, New York Public Library, In
Broken Images: Selected Letters of Robert Graves 1914–1946, edited by
Paul O’Prey (London: Hutchinson, 1942), p. 77.
16
Robert Graves, On English Poetry (New York: Knopf, 1922), p. 68.
17
Mark Oppenheimer, ‘Poetry’s Cross-Dressing Kingmaker’, New York
Times, 14 September 2012
<http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/16/magazine/stephen-burt-poetrys-
cross-dressing-kingmaker.html?pagewanted=all> (para. 4 of 30)
[accessed 4 October 2012].
18
See note 16.
19
Robert Graves, Poetic Unreason and Other Studies (London: Cecil
Palmer, 1925), p. 117.
20
Poetic Unreason, p. 123.
21
D. N. G. Carter, Robert Graves: The Lasting Poetic Achievement
(Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989), p. 144.
22
In the introduction to his translation of The Golden Ass, Graves notes
that ‘golden’ implies a non-serious, extravagant style of storytelling, and
says that Apuleius adopted that style, which Adlington termed ‘strange
and absurd’, ‘for the same reason that Rabelais did. [. . .] Both were
priests – pious, lively, exceptionally learned, provincial priests – who
found that the popular tale gave them a wider field for their descriptions
of contemporary morals and manners, punctuated by philosophical
asides, than any more respectable literary form’. In making a
‘philosophical aside’ in Apuleius’s ‘golden’ style, Graves seems to be
drawing attention to its similarity with his own creative absurdity,
claiming a sanction in a tradition of learning, philosophical seriousness
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and testing norms of respectability. Robert Graves, The Transformations

of Lucius Otherwise Known as The Golden Ass: A New Translation by
Robert Graves from Apuleius (New York: Farrar, Straus, 1951), p. x.
23
Judith Plotz, Romanticism and the Vocation of Childhood (New York:
Palgrave, 2001), p. 24.
24
Robert Graves, ‘Legitimate Criticism of Poetry’, in 5 Pens in Hand
(New York: Doubleday, 1958), pp. 33–53.
25
The earliest version of the popular nursery rhyme ‘Hark! Hark! The
Dogs Do Bark’ cited by the Opies in the Oxford Dictionary of Nursery
Rhymes (see note 38) is a song in Westminster Drollery (1672) called ‘A
Dialogue between a man (in Garrison) and his wife (with her company)
Storming without’. However, the parodic nature of the droll song
suggests the possible existence of an earlier model, now presumably
lost: one which, perhaps, Shakespeare expected his audience to know.
Graves might have known the popular version, and expected his
audience to as well, and thus appears indirectly to be reminding them of
the authority as well as antiquity of nursery rhyme.
26
The Less Familiar Nursery Rhymes, Augustan Books of English
Poetry, second series, 14 (London: Benn, 1927).
27
Robert Graves, The Crowning Privilege: The Clark Lectures 1954–
1955 (London: Cassell, 1955); Robert Graves, Oxford Addresses on
Poetry (London: Cassell, 1961).
28
William Graves, email to author and Carl Hahn, 25 September 2012.
29
Tomas Graves, email to JonArno Lawson, 19 October 2005.
30
The image of the shoeless boy in the snow would cause older readers
to remember the bootless soldiers Graves encountered in France. The
striking resemblance may suggest a bleed-through of war trauma, but
perhaps Graves was inserting himself into the poem conspicuously in
the form of his own lived experience to signal space for poetic self-
awareness within the nursery rhyme, and to reorient traumatic imagery.
31
The plot of Graves’s revision is somewhat reminiscent of E. T. A.
Hoffmann’s The Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr, in which the
perfectionist Kreisler tosses aside his guitar in anguish because he
cannot tune it, while Julia, unconcerned with the idiosyncrasies of
tuning, picks up the guitar and begins to sing.
32
See Michael Joseph, ‘The Penny Fiddle and Poetic Truth: The
Children’s Poems of Robert Graves’, in Poetry and Childhood, ed. by
Morag Styles (Staffordshire: Trentham Press, 2010), pp. 81–89.
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33
See Patrick McGuinness, ‘Robert Graves, Modernism, and the “Poetic
Body”’, in New Perspectives on Robert Graves, ed. by Patrick J. Quinn
(Selingsgrove: Susquehanna University Press, 1999), pp. 46–61.
34
Robert Graves, ‘Sweeney among the Blackbirds: A Talk for the
U.I.C.A., Washington, February 17th, 1958’, in Food for Centaurs:
Stories Talks, Critical Studies, Poems (New York: Doubleday, 1960),
pp. 97–119 (pp. 104–08).
35
Letter to Marsh, 17 December 1921, Berg Collection, New York
Public Library, In Broken Images, pp. 130–32.
36
Robert Graves, Poems 1929 (Hammersmith: Seizin Press, 1929). The
collection also contains two whimsical and arguably childlike poems:
‘Welsh Incident’ and ‘Wm. Brazier’, almost an anti-nursery rhyme, but
also with a nursery rhyme flavour.
37
Douglas Day, Swifter than Reason: The Poetry and Criticism of
Robert Graves (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press,
1963), pp. 125–26.
38
The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes, ed. by Iona and Peter
Opie. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 352.
39
Dunstan Ward notes (Graves, Complete Poems, II, p. 275) that ‘In
Poems 1929 the poem is not divided into stanzas, which first appear in
Poems 1926–1930’. There may be many explanations for breaking the
poem into stanzas, and one would be that Graves came to realise that
couplets would emphasise the interdependence of the two characters and
reinforce the impression of recursiveness.
40
In a discussion of a definition of poetry in On English Poetry, Graves
makes a reference to this kind of synthesis as being a trademark of
poetry: ‘If those who rally to the later Pope and those who find in the
prophetic Blake the true standard of Poetry, equally deny that my
definition covers their experience of the word, I admit that in an
encyclopedic sense it is quite inadequate, and indeed a fusion of two
contradictory senses; indeed, again, a typically poetic definition’ (p.
121).
41
This kind of impossible poem invites comparison with the strange
loop phenomenon proposed by Douglas Hofstadter. Hofstadter defines
‘strange loop’ as ‘an abstract loop in which, in the series of stages that
constitute the cycling-around, there is a shift from one level of
abstraction (or structure) to another, which feels like an upwards
movement in a hierarchy, and yet somehow the successive “upward”
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shifts turn out to give rise to a closed cycle. That is, despite one’s sense
of departing ever further from one’s origin, one winds up, to one’s
shock, exactly where one had started out. In short, a strange loop is a
paradoxical level-crossing feedback loop.’ Douglas Hofstadter, I Am a
Strange Loop (New York: Basic Books, 2007), pp. 101–02.
42
Peter Markie, ‘Rationalism vs. Empiricism’, in The Stanford
Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2012 Edition), ed. by Edward N.
Zalta <http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2012/entries/rationalism-
empiricism/> [accessed 3 October 2012].
43
Poetic Unreason, p. 125.
44
‘Rationalism vs. Empiricism’.
45
I am using a specialised definition of ‘warrant’ relevant to
epistemology studies. Knowing a particular proposition, or accepting
that a particular proposition is true, requires not only that we believe it
and that it be true, but also something that distinguishes knowing from a
lucky guess, that authorises it as knowledge. This something is known as
a ‘warrant’. See Markie, ibid.
46
Ibid.
47
Marianne Moore, Collected Poems (New York: Macmillan, 1951), p.
60.
48
Frank Kersnowski, Conversations with Robert Graves (Jackson, MS.:
University Press of Mississippi, 1989), p. 55.
49
Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion,
trans. by Willard R. Trask (New York: Harcourt, 1957), pp. 8–9.
50
The White Goddess, p. 10.
51
One of the dominant ideas of The Penny Fiddle, and one that rings
throughout Graves’s writings and lectures on poetry during the 1950s, is
that discourse and meta-discourse are harmonious and continuous within
poetry itself: pleasure is form – and form is governed by poetic truth.
(See Michael Joseph, ‘The Penny Fiddle and Poetic Truth’, pp. 81–89).
52
Patrick J. Keane, A Wild Civility (Missouri: University of Missouri
Press, 1980), pp. 18–19. Graves makes yet another improvisation on
Coleridge in ‘Hide and Seek’, a post-Penny Fiddle children’s poem,
issued in the English edition of The Poor Boy Who Followed His Star
(London: Cassell, 1968); the poem, which plays on untrustworthy
echoes, echoes the line from Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner,
‘Alone, alone, all, all alone’, as ‘Alone, alone all on my own’.